Linkage

Why are you even here? Go read something else. Something good.

The American Prospect: Battlestar Galacticons by Brad Reed, discusses the rise and fall of Battlestar Galactica in the eyes of many a Right Wing pundit.

Rolling Stone: The Worst Congress Ever by Matt Taibbi speaks for itself.


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Philosophizing, Issue One: Schopenhauer

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Critical Spear

From the bowls of UCLA comes a wonderful socio-philosophical reading of Brittany Spears, as seen through the Critical Theory of Theodore Adorno, among others. I’ve been getting heavily into western philosophy these past few months, so expect notes to follow. Pray it’ll all matriculate through the soapy mesh of my brain to birth some new and glorious idea (or Ideal) for these malignant modern times.

But for now, read you fools. Read and think.

Tag: Personal: philosophy: Critical Theory: T. A. Adorno:

Blinking in the Face of Poverty

Whenever I write and I find things go…less than admirably….I find myself walking. Most often I walk the twelve blocks to 39th Avenue, thinking, and muttering to myself. I work through snatches of dialog, plan out sequences of events, and once I’m at 39th it’s a simple matter to turn north, walk two more blocks, and pick up some groceries from the Safeway.

Three days ago I took the trip, picking up a rasher of bacon and some tortillas. I paid with plastic and caught the bus back home, being too lazy to walk, my head too full of ideas. I was thinking about giant monsters, scientists and the way the afternoon light fell flat as a flapjack on my neighborhood’s sidewalks.

I found a homeless man sitting outside my house. Right outside, on the treated wood planter the keeps the English ivy from swallowing the sidewalks and rampaging, in a very prim, proper, English way, down the road.

He word red and black plaid—a long sleeve shirt I’m sure feels much colder in the dead of night when one is sleeping on the ground—and faded pants, once black, now as gray as the hair sprouting from his head and beard. “Excuse me, man,” he asked. “You have a quarter?”

I’m not afraid to say I lied. Of course I lied. I lied to him as surely as I lie to his kith and kin downtown who regularly troll through the human sea of commuters, asking similar questions. At times I think the only upside to my not smoking (other than the decreased risk of catching every form of cancer not caused by the sun) is the ability to tell those homeless that, honestly, no, I don’t have an “extra” cigarette. Even when I, theoretically, did I bought them all for myself and was never in a mood to share. I don’t believe in assisted suicide when doing so is inconvenient.

It’s a simple thing, lying to the homeless. Practice awhile and it’s as easy as slipping on shoes. So easy it becomes an autonomic response, as it has for members of my class from time out of mind.

“No,” I said, adding, “I’m sorry,” though I was not. I was thinking, Shit, man, I’m not doing so well, myself.

Except that was a self-severing lie, and I can’t lie to myself. I caught myself before I even made it the twenty-plus steps to my doorway. As I put my food into the ‘fridge I peeled off the layers of my lie until it stood naked in my mind and shivered.

After all, I thought, you’re miles from that man out there. That man who’s out there, not fifty feet away, wearing all the clothing he owns. Who sleeps on wet grass when he can find it and hard concrete when he can’t. Who’s come to here, to this neighborhood, in search of peace, out of some vain and fleeting hope he’ll be unnoticed by the policemen. As if the police in my ‘hood were some mystical, benign sub-species that doesn’t get drunk on its own power, that doesn’t rouse you out of concrete sleep to present you with the immortal choice of, “Move it, or loose it.”

I looked at my ‘fridge. Dirty, sure. A little light on the protein, but stocked, running. Humming blithely along, putting paid to my lie and shaming me into action.

I peaked into my wallet, thinking, Is this how Bruce Wayne feels? Five, six, seven, eight dollars total. No, I thought, Bruce Wayne is moved by grief and honest-to-God compassion. If there’s any guilt moving his hands it’s the gnawing, niggling guilt of plane crash and earthquake survivors. Not at all what I felt as I stood in my kitchen and counted my money again.

—Eight dollars, my mind said. —Great. Why not just escort Mr. Red-and-Black to the nearest ATM, pass him your card and say, “Have at it”? It’ll do more good. Or just as much, considering the old bird’s probably drunk. Or insane. You see that brown paper bag next to his feet?

I had. But at that moment I didn’t care. I put my money in my pocket and stepped back outside. These are the moments, I thought. When the wolf is at your door that you have to stand and see what you’re really made of. And you have to be honest with yourself. Talk is cheep if you’re not prepared to walk the walk of the honest, the just and the damned.

—Which one are you? My head asked. I didn’t know, and that vaguely frightened me as I walked down the parking lot and turned left.

Mr. Red-and-Black was gone. Phlegm and the brown paper bag were all that marked his passage.

—Too late, too late, my head told me. At times I think of this as my Joker voice. We’re connected, that voice and I, like comedy and tragedy. It derives comedic pleasure from my occasional tragedies.

I turned right and there he was, shuffling up the block, past the Japanese restaurant and its neighboring bar. Past the once-thriving Korean market that’s now a hollow, boarded up shell, to the grass and sidewalks of the next block. There he half-sank, half-fell to the grass in an apparent dead faint.

—Or stupor? I nodded. Or stupor. Big deal. Because you can mouth pretensions of charity until the vaults of heaven fall down. As the dead rock star once asked, who needs action when you’ve got words?

I do. And so I shook the homeless man’s shoulder. “Man. Hey, man.”

It took three shakes before his gray, watery eyes fluttered open. “This is all I had on hand,” I told him, slipping the money into a dirty, yellow-nailed hand. “But you better move on, yo. Some of my neighbors aren’t as…gracious as the rest of us.”

Mr. Red-and-Black blinked twice and his eyes were the color of cataracts. “Sorry,” he half-muttered, speaking through nubs of teeth and a tongue as red as the checker board on his shirt.

I shook this off and turned away. No, no sorry necessary. Hell, I’m sorry I keep blinking whenever I come face of face with poverty. Real, honest to god poverty of the kind you can rarely find in the woody creeks that birthed me. I’m sorry I cannot do more. Or will not do more, as the case may or may not be. I’m sorry I couldn’t express any of this to Mr. Red-and-Black at the time. I’m sorry for the fact that he probably wouldn’t have understood me, anyway.

I went back into my house, my clean, pristine, paid for apartment with its dirty but-stocked ’fridge. I mixed myself a drink, sat down and fired up this humming box of a machine, all the while wondering if I’d done something noble…and if I had then what was this ambivalence in my guts? More middle class guilt? Or some other, more malignant species?

I began to wonder as I began to write. I’m still wondering now, as dawn breaks over My Fair City and the homeless shuffle toward downtown with its kitchens and its haunts.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: the homeless: poverty: class warfare:

My Brain Has a Vagina

In lue of actual content, I present this not-quite-all-that-surprising quiz result.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% Male

Your brain leans female You think with your heart, not your head Sweet and considerate, you are a giver But you're tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you! (Test taker's note: Ha!. Well, that's a goddamn lie, right there. Shows what you know, random blogthings brain gender quiz.)

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Via Poppy Z. Brite’s most-excellent blog, Dispatches from Tanganyika. Buy her shit on eBay for she is a native of New Orleans and a writer in search of a house amid the wreck of her Fair City.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writers: Poppy Z. Brite: quiz results:

Four A.M. Voices and the Week to Myself

My college, Col. Giddens, has suggested that is the duty, nay, responsibility, of all writers to “communicate the in-communicatable,” a calling as daunting as it is practically impossible. Is that, I wonder, the purpose of these notes from the dulling edge of the American Empire? To communicate some incommunicable Truth about It All? Oh, the horror…the horror if this is so for I feel it is a project as far beyond me as the stars of Andromeda; as intangible as the halo the forms around the moon when the night is filled with clouds and your head with LSD; as devoid of meaning as the bleating of Our Glorious Leader, George Dubya Bush.

So much for all that, yar. And so much for my writings here. Dispatches from Within the Empire have been short and sweet in coming due to that oldest of all devils, Circumstance. I am currently embroiled in a transitional phase of my life and times, both as a writer and a man…or perhaps I mischaracterize the situation, investing it with far more Drama than it is due.

In any case, Things have occurred since last we spoke. I have swapped one cube farm for another, changing my job with what, to the casual, must seem a callus disregard for my employment record. As if my resume were some unbroken chain of blameless upright-itude, rather than the erratic patchwork of piecemeal employment that it is today. By the time I am a famous author of notorious public excess I expect my resume to look much worse. I am banking, after my own fashion, to hold more jobs than Mark Twain by the time I am done (while at the same time making much more intelligent investments). I’ve already beaten out another famous Missouri native on this score: that great sage and Beat groupie/godfather, William S. Burroughs, one of the few junkies lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon already at his disposal.

So, yes, I quit my job, and burned the bridge behind myself. I have told everyone I did it out of malignant hatred of the work, but that is not the truth. I’ve told everyone I quit because of foresight and convenience. After all, that cube farm was a 90 minute train ride away, both ways. That’s twelve hours a week lost to commuting alone, another unpaid workday in itself. One hundred and thirty-two hours in all, lost, never to be regained. A lot of time that could’ve been spent writing. And besides, my Fair, adopted City is scheduled to begin a grand maul re-design of its downtown transit hub this coming January. Ground break falls on the 9th of that month and god help all the poor bastard bus drivers who’ll be force to re-route or catch a grill full of civic construction worker. Better to net myself a job on this side of the blasted river, leaving downtown to its own chaotic madness. This I have done, so that is that.

But that is still not the truth of why I quite my job. I could (and will) easily adapt to the gutting of downtown. I can (and will) willing unwrap myself from the sweet embrace of my beloved Partner every morning for no other purpose than to do something I do not care a wick for.

No, I quite my job because on Monday, the 24th of September, I woke from a terrible dream I cannot remember in a cold and clammy sweat at four a.m. I coughed and felt the stirrings of the sickness that (by week’s end) would blossom into a respiratory infection. My tonsils were swollen and tinder. By morning they would be the size and consistency of children’s marbles.

But in the night they were only tender, and they were not what motivated me to call in sick. A still, calm voice in my head did that. It was the voice that woke me at four a.m. The voice that moved my hand hours later when I punched the alarm clock and reached for the phone.

Call in sick, it told me. It did not need to speak again.

The next morning I found the ad for my new job amid the refuse of posting in the customer service section of cragislist. I visited the place, filled out my application and passed my typing test with seventy words per minute, two errors.

By week’s end I was snorting and sniffling my way through my interview, head full of snot and cough medicine. By the beginning of next week my lymph nodes felt like twin golf balls straining to meet each other in the center of my throat...and, somehow, I managed to make myself heard over the phone. Yes, I would love a job with your esteemed company. Yes, I would have to give my current employer notice. Yes, I would love to start on the 17th. Seven a.m.? Perfect.

I gave my current employer exactly one day of notice, more than enough to show up, turn in my badge and collect my last paycheck. Thus have I lied my way into a solid week of no external responsibilities. I’ve kicked cigarettes and am well supplied with booze. There is nothing but sheer laziness standing between me and a full week’s worth of honest-to-god-writing.

Not blog writing, obviously, for blog posts are the vain, self-publishing writer’s crack rock. They are the thing I write when I am too lazy to write the movie reviews that stock my website or (and this is key, here) the fiction that will one day pay my bills.

Those are the projects that have consumed me these past weeks and I’ve charged away at them with a rough single-mindedness that would seem insane to those who do not see the creation of prose expressions as an end unto themselves. Hell, I don’t even do that half the time, but when I do I am more than willing to gather strange looks and sharp comments from those I know and love.

I can only imagine what they’d say if I told them, Yes, I quit my job because the voice in my head told me to. After all, we all have voices. But it’s not everyday they wake you up to tell you what to do.

Unless your name happens to be Burkowitz.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writing: Fiction: Short Stories: Authorial Bitching: The Job: